Shadowing Dynamic Scenes with Arbitrary BRDFs

Abstract

We present a real-time relighting and shadowing method for dynamic scenes with varying lighting, view and BRDFs. Our approach is based on a compact representation of reflectance data that allows for changing the BRDF at run-time and a data-driven method for accurately synthesizing self-shadows on articulated and deformable geometries. Unlike previous self-shadowing approaches, we do not rely on local blocking heuristics. We do not fit a model to the BRDF-weighted visibility, but rather only to the visibility that changes during animation. In this manner, our model is more compact than previous techniques and requires less computation both during fitting and at run-time. Our reflectance product operators can re-integrate arbitrary low-frequency view-dependent BRDF effects on-the-fly and are compatible with all previous dynamic visibility generation techniques as well as our own data-driven visibility model. We apply our reflectance product operators to three different visibility generation models, and our data-driven model can achieve framerates well over 300Hz.